Ken Burns' six-part series, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea," will make you want to swoop like an egret in the Everglades, romp like a young gray wolf over lichen-covered rocks in Yellowstone.
This gorgeous 12-hour series -- a project that took six years to film -- will air on PBS at 8 p.m. EDT on six consecutive nights beginning Sunday.
Sunday night it tells the stories that hatched the national-parks movement, focusing on Yellowstone and Yosemite. Monday's installment explores the perennial tussle between land use and land protection and Theodore Roosevelt's role in advancing the mission of preservation.
The last episode, from 1946 to 1980, shows us that, like the parks' earliest tourists, who threatened the landscapes with moneymaking schemes, hotels and tour buses, postwar America risked "loving our parks to death" in record numbers with its new affluence and mobility.
Written by Dayton Duncan, one of numerous writers, historians, scientists and park rangers who are interviewed, the film makes the point that man is a deserving species, too: We need the spiritual nourishment and aesthetic well-being these lands provide, but our role and needs pale in comparison to those species that depend on these habitats to propagate.
In almost every instance of park preservation, a relatively few people steered the course, and their discovery of the place was mostly serendipitous. The American West, where the first parks were established, was lucky to be relatively unknown to most Americans and their elected officials.
The cast of men and women who stood up for these lands stars John Muir, who made Yosemite his sanctuary and religion. Lancelot Jones, a son of the Biscayne wetlands, became an advocate for the founding of Biscayne National Park and a guide in it once it was established. Adolph Murie, a biologist whose field studies of wolves became the scientific standard, guided policy that reintroduced the wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem.
Muir was a young man looking for work when a property owner in what is now part of Yosemite National Park hired him to run a logging operation. He became this country's leading voice for land preservation and brought Yosemite and other areas to the public's attention.
A most endearing figure in the film is Shelton Johnson, a Yosemite park ranger who grew up in inner-city Detroit. A field trip to Yosemite as a teen changed the course of his life. Today, he brings remnants of Muir's reverence and poetry to Yosemite's visitors.
A particularly memorable story is the adventure of Truman Evert. An early visitor in a party of surveyors, he got lost in Yellowstone. When he was found by two campers at 50 pounds and out of his mind, he survived to tell the tale in a popular magazine. Lee Whittlesey -- an interviewee in the film -- edited his work into a book, "Lost in the Yellowstone: Thirty-seven Days of Peril," that the University of Utah Press published in 2002.
No doubt this series will punch up attendance at the national parks. The added benefit could be a pushback against development, pollution and vehicular abuse that the National Parks Conservation Association warns us about. (Visit www.npca.org.)
Restraint and reverence have always been challenges in this great land, where we still hanker to tinker beyond our rights as a species, even against the best idea we ever had.
(Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Embargoed for Sunday release
With PARKS1-TV
Editors: Check local listings
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